The explosion of flash memory technology has dramatically increased the storage capacity and decreased the cost of non-volatile semiconductor memory. The technology has fueled the proliferation of Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash drives and is poised to replace magnetic hard disks in some applications. A solid state drive (SSD) is a flash memory-based storage device that emulates a magnetic hard disk drive (HDD). SSDs do not contain any moving parts and depend on flash memory chips to store data. Benefits of SSDs over HDDs include higher data transfer rates, lower data access time, improved shock and vibration tolerance, and reduced power consumption. For some applications, the benefits outweigh the higher cost of an SSD relative to an HDD.